


All the King's Men

by belovedmuerto



Series: All the King's Horses [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Depression, Gen, Idiots, PTSD, Pining, Some angst, kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-19
Updated: 2014-12-19
Packaged: 2018-03-02 03:34:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2798036
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/belovedmuerto/pseuds/belovedmuerto
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I don’t know how much he remembers, but he seems to at least know that he knows you. That’s a start.”</p><p>Steve finally lifts his head. “Yeah. It is.”</p><p>“He’ll be back, Steve.”</p><p>“You think so?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	All the King's Men

**Author's Note:**

> This is a direct sequel to "All the King's Horses" and you should probably read that one first. And there will be more stories in this series as well. 
> 
> Thanks again go to moonblossom for doing a quick beta job on this.

Bucky doesn’t follow Sam back in through the window to the fire escape, and something like a steel band wraps itself around Steve’s chest, constricting, making it impossible to draw breath. It feels akin to one of his old asthma attacks, only ten times worse, because he’s not used to this anymore. He doesn’t remember how to breathe through it, he doesn’t have Bucky there holding him and breathing deep to help him remember to keep going until his airways clear again, to help keep him from panicking, he can’t breathe, he can’t breathe, he can’t breathe.

The next thing he knows he’s on the couch with his head between his knees, Sam rubbing meant-to-be-soothing circles in his back. They almost are, except Bucky still hasn’t come back through the window.

“Breathe,” Sam’s saying, voice soothing like Steve is young, oh so young.

“Breathe,” Sam says again, and Steve shuts his eyes and breathes.

When Steve’s breathing more closely resembles normal, Sam speaks again.

“You’ve got to give him time, Rogers. Take it easy on the guy, don’t push him right now. The time for that will come later. He’s got some issues. More than probably the rest of the world combined. Or at least most of it.”

Steve nods, but doesn’t lift his head. This is almost comfortable, sitting on the couch with his head still between his knees-- _huh, the rug needs to be vacuumed_ , he thinks--and with Sam offering sound advice and his presence. It’s comforting. 

“I don’t know how much he remembers, but he seems to at least know that he knows you. That’s a start.”

Steve finally lifts his head. “Yeah. It is.”

“He’ll be back, Steve.”

“You think so?” Steve refuses to be embarrassed that his voice wavers a little on the question.

“Yes. I do.”

\--

The next few days are something of a blur. Steve spends most of them in his little studio room, sketchbook in hand. He doesn’t have the presence of mind to do much other than doodle, though, so he does that. He does that, and he worries about Bucky, out there alone in a world he probably doesn’t much recognize, in a city that used to be his own but is so different now, after so many years.

Sam comes for him, eventually. Steve looks up as Sam gently tugs the sketchbook out of his hands, gently pulls the pencil from his grip. 

Sam gives him a questioning look, and Steve nods. Sam flips through the sketchbook, his eyebrows climbing his forehead.

“OK,” he says, eventually, while Steve stares at his hands, sure that his face is beet red, because while he’s attempted to draw something else, the sketchbook is admittedly mostly full of Bucky’s face. “Maybe a little less fixating, dude. Come on, let’s go for a run or something.”

So they do that. Steve lets himself be distracted for a while. He’s finally getting good at modulating his pace so that he stays with Sam on their jogs, although he’s pretty sure at that pace he could run a marathon without breaking a sweat.

He doesn’t tell Sam that, though.

After the jog, and after showers, Sam orders Thai food. A mountain of Thai food. Steve has discovered that he quite likes Thai food (he has to remember to cross that off the list in that little notebook of his), and he realizes he’s starving.

“When’s the last time I ate?” he asks, around a mouthful of Pad Thai.

“It’s been a while,” Sam replies, clearly highly amused. He’s not smiling, but his eyes are full of mirth, and Steve likes that. Sam being happy makes him feel just a little bit lighter.

Steve shrugs though, not saying anymore, and applies himself to his food.

\--

He doesn’t think he’ll be able to sleep. He’s pretty sure he hasn’t slept since Bucky left again. He thinks it’s been almost three days, but he’s not entirely sure, and he doesn’t care to find out, not really.

Sam has been great, because Sam is great, but he just rolls his eyes when Steve starts wandering back towards his studio instead of towards his room.

“Nope. Dude. No.”

“What?”

“Come on, you can bunk down with me.”

“What?” Steve asks again. 

“You’re just going to brood otherwise, and even you need sleep sometimes, Steve.”

“Are you sure?” He doesn’t think he could feel more relief in that moment. 

“Yeah. Just, go get your blankets. You’re a bed hog.”

Steve smiles, a little.

\--

After that, he starts trying to keep a routine, again. Sleeping in his own bed, eating at regular intervals (and his body thanks him for it, he hadn’t realized how much the headaches were tied to lack of food while he’d been worrying about Bucky and his absence), and getting out of the apartment during the day with Sam.

He hears from Natasha a couple of times, lets her know that Bucky has made contact but has left again.

She tells him to cool it with the puppy dog eyes, and maybe Bucky’ll stick around a while longer.

Sam, reading his text over his shoulder like the nosy person he fully admits to being, agrees with her.

\--

There’s a sound from the direction of the living room, and Steve’s heart soars with hope even as he’s rolling out of bed and taking up the shield, just in case. 

Bucky looks up at him with wild eyes when he comes into the room, one foot on the floor, one still on the fire escape. 

Steve relaxes out of his defensive stance, letting the shield drop down to his side. 

“You could just use the door. It’s unlocked, too,” he says, trying to sound light, like he’s not ready to beg Bucky to stay this time.

Bucky looks from him, to the door, to the window he’s still half in. He looks like he can’t decide what to do. He shrugs, but doesn’t move otherwise.

“You can stay,” Steve adds. “If you want to. I won’t, I won’t blubber on you again. Well, probably not.”

Slowly, Bucky draws his other foot into the room, stands up straight.

Steve sighs.

“You dropped it,” Bucky says, looking at the shield still on Steve’s left arm. It’s a bit dinged up, or at least the paint is; Steve hasn’t taken the time to repaint it again. Bucky’s voice is hoarse, like he doesn’t use it much. Steve wonders if he’s interacted with anyone at all since the helicarrier, other than him. (Although considering the HYDRA programming, perhaps that’s for the best.)

Steve shrugs. “They pulled it out of the Potomac while I was in the hospital.”

“I shot you,” Bucky says, voice still hoarse, wariness evident in every line of his body.

Steve shrugs again. “I’ve had worse?”

Bucky snorts, and Steve finds himself grinning at him.

“You can stay,” he says again. “If you want to.”

Bucky shrugs. Steve decides to take that as consent. “I’ll get you some blankets and pillows. Is the couch ok?”

Bucky looks at the couch and shrugs again. 

When he comes back with blankets, Steve makes a show of setting down the shield, in Bucky’s line of sight. 

“Maybe you could, um, disarm?” he says, gently. A suggestion, nothing else. He doesn’t know if Bucky will listen, but he wants Bucky to feel safe here.

Bucky looks at him, steady, and doesn’t say anything.

“The gun, at least?”

Bucky looks at him for another moment, no expression at all on his face, and then he shrugs. He takes out his gun, breaks it down, and sets it on the coffee table, showing Steve the round from the chamber before he sets it next to the gun and the clip. Then he pulls three knives off his person, from god only knows where, and then sits back on the couch, very deliberately showing Steve his back, as though that’s some sort of sign of trust.

Steve knows it isn’t.

“What about the fourth one?”

Bucky looks at him, surprised. Shocked, actually. It’s the first real expression Steve has seen on his face, and it’s gone just as quickly as it showed up. But he doesn’t ask. He doesn’t move at all. He’s waiting. Is this a test?

Steve shrugs and gestures towards his right ankle. “You always carried a knife in your boot, Buck. Always.”

That steady non-expression is back again. But he reaches down, slowly, and pulls the last knife from his boot, and sets it next to the others.

“Happy?” he asks, and for a moment, he sounds like the Bucky Steve remembers growing up with, though his expression is entirely unfamiliar.

Steve grins at him again anyway. “Yeah, Buck, I am.” 

He means a lot more than just the knives and the gun.

Bucky blinks, and then looks away.

After an awkward moment, Steve speaks again. “I could sit up with you for a bit, if you want?”

Bucky looks up at him, and Steve knows that his hope is written plain on his face. He doesn’t try to hide it, but he waits, to see what Bucky will do. Hopefully he won’t simply grab his weapons and make a break for it again. He doesn’t want to push, but he so desperately wants Bucky to stay, to feel safe here, to remember him.

Bucky shrugs. 

“We could talk?” Steve ventures, as he crosses to the couch and sits next to his friend, close but not so close they’re touching. He looks at Bucky, and Bucky gives him a look. A look that he remembers Bucky giving him a million times over the years, one that clearly says ‘yeah, right pal.’

So he amends. “I could talk?”

Bucky looks at him for a moment, assessing, and then he shrugs again.

Steve decides to take that as a yes, and he starts talking. He wouldn’t have thought he’d even know where to start, but he starts with waking up in that silly room in SHIELD’s NY headquarters. He makes it funny, because looking back it was, everything from the baseball game from years before he’d gone into the ice to how ridiculously poor their replica of 40s womenswear had been. Everything about that woman had been wrong, from her undergarments to her hair and makeup. 

Looking back, it’s pretty laughable, and he even manages to chuckle a few times, but Bucky doesn’t really seem to react at all. Steve can tell he’s listening though, somehow he just knows that Bucky is hanging on every word, so he keeps going.

Steve talks for hours. He talks about Natasha and Sam and the other Avengers (he doesn’t quite know when he started counting Sam as part of the team, but he does, and he knows that Sam will be a valuable addition. He can tell that Bucky will be too, perhaps. Eventually. He doesn’t know how long that will take, though, but he plans on being at Bucky’s side for every moment of it, if Bucky will just let him). He talks about Stark and about his dad and about their prickly relationship and Ms Potts, who is a goddess among women for putting up with him. He talks about Fury and Hill and everyone he knows here in this time.

His voice goes hoarse after a while, and he gets up to go into the kitchen and get two glasses of water. He takes sips from both of them before he hands one to Bucky, so Bucky will know it’s safe. Although he isn’t sure if Bucky doesn’t have some sort of immunity to poisons. Steve’s been told he’s probably resistant to a lot of them himself.

He keeps talking, about everything that’s awesome and amazing about living in the future, and everything that’s confusing and wrong--”Don’t even bother with bananas, Buck. Trust me.”--and he keeps talking and eventually he gets around to the things that he misses about the past, and he talks about how he’s not supposed to dwell on the past and on what he can’t get back and how much he hates that sometimes, and how it seems like everyone is dead or forgetting him and Peggy’s really the only one left and still Bucky doesn’t really react, and still Bucky seems to be hanging on his every word, and Steve slumps a little, and he realizes with a start that he’s leaning on Bucky, but it feels like Bucky is leaning a little bit on him as well, so he doesn’t move.

He keeps talking, and talking, and talking, and eventually he drifts off in the middle of a sentence. 

\--

Steve wakes up curled on his side on the couch, a blanket draped over him. 

Sam is in the kitchen watching the coffee brew.

Bucky is gone again, and Steve sighs as he sits up, rubs his face with his hands and then leans, breathing deep, trying not to panic that Bucky had just left again.

One of his knives is still on the coffee table, though the rest of the weapons are gone.

Steve decides to take that as a good sign. He’s grasping at straws and he knows it.

“I think,” Sam starts quietly, when Steve shuffles up next to him, grabs a second mug out of the cupboard, “that he might remember more than he’s letting on.”

Steve shrugs. What does it matter, if Bucky won’t even stay for longer than a few hours at a time? How are they ever going to get anywhere if he keeps disappearing like this?

“Maybe he’s overwhelmed, Steve,” Sam continues, conversational, like Steve isn’t disintegrating where he stands.

Steve shrugs again, turns his face away so Sam won’t see how his eyes are surely shining. 

“Go get dressed, let’s go for a run,” Sam says, and Steve nods and goes for his room, taking his mug of black coffee with him.

\--

They run. They don’t talk. Steve is keeping the pace just at the limit of Sam’s endurance. He doesn’t want to talk. He just wants to run and run and not think. Steve stops when Sam does. Sam looks in one direction, towards home, and Steve looks in the other. Sam waves at him.

“Go. I’ll head home and make breakfast. Don’t run all day, man.”

Steve nods, and takes off. He keeps his pace on the slow side even now, even though he wants to sprint, so as not to draw too much attention. It’s later than normal for them to be running, and there are more people about than he’s used to.

He wishes he could keep going forever.

When he finally gets back to his place, it’s to the smell of coffee and bacon and sausage and breakfast. Sam is in the kitchen, bopping along to whatever music he’s put on the stereo, already showered and dressed and in the middle of basically cooking all the breakfast food left in the house. Steve will need to go to the store again. Maybe he’ll try that grocery ordering service Sam keeps telling him about.

Sam doesn’t say anything until they’re sitting down, until Steve is shoveling food into his mouth and can’t talk back very easily.

“Look, Steve.”

Steve looks up, with what he hopes is a ‘what now, I am _eating_ ’ expression on his face.

Sam chuckles. “You get to listen and not sass me back this time, Rogers.”

Steve makes a noise of protest, around the bacon and eggs he’s trying to chew. There is a ton of food in front of him, and he plans to eat it all. If that means he has to listen to Sam lecture him about things like clinical depression and PTSD and coping mechanisms, then so be it.

“You’ve had a couple years to get used to being here, right? In the future?”

Steve nods again. He knows where this is going. He doesn’t disagree, he doesn’t say that he’s not used to being in the future, and sometimes he misses the life he grew up in so much it aches like a missing limb, makes it hard to breathe, because that would just make Sam frown at him and try to get him to talk about it. There’s nothing that can be done for it, though, and Steve is adjusting. More slowly that it would appear from the outside, but he is adjusting.

“He’s had a few months,” Sam goes on, either not noticing Steve’s reaction, or else deciding not to tackle it right now. “Most of which he spent taking out more of HYDRA than you have. By himself.”

Steve swallows. “Most of what I took out, he was with me. But I think I get it. Keep it together, don’t push?”

“I mean, he might need a little pushing here and there, but yeah, basically. Let him set the pace. And I’m pretty sure he can take care of himself, wherever it is he’s going when he leaves here. He carries a lot of knives.”

“Four,” Steve replies. He takes another huge bite of eggs, and a sausage.

“Four?”

He nods, and just talks around the food. “That he let me see. And a gun. I’m pretty sure there’s more than that, though.”

“Your best friend is a scary motherfucker, Steve.”

Steve shrugs.

\--

The thing is, Steve knows that he has PTSD, or shell-shock, or whatever it is you want to call it these days. He knows he’s not really out in the world, like everyone has been telling him he should be. He doesn’t really make new friends besides the ones that have sort of adopted him or have to listen when he gives orders, and he certainly doesn’t date, despite Natasha’s trying to set him up all the time (and he wonders if he should tell her to branch out to people other than just women, but he’s pretty sure he’s not ready for that conversation either). He’s probably clinically depressed, and he doesn’t want to talk to anyone about it. He’s OK with it right now, he’s settled into it and it really isn’t so bad he can’t see the light of day. He’s just not ready to step into that light, not yet.

Right now, all he wants is to concentrate on something that isn’t himself and how shitty he feels most of the time. 

Worrying about the fact that his best friend in the whole world, the guy who _was_ his whole world for the vast majority of his life, is also the world’s most notorious assassin seems like a good distraction. Even if that’s probably not a good way to approach Bucky’s recovery and integration into modern life.

So he’s a mess. So what?

\--

Sam leaves him alone after breakfast, probably sensing that Steve needs some time to decompress and process what Sam’s told him. Steve takes a long shower, and hopes that the noise of it covers the sounds he can’t quite stifle. 

He goes for a walk, later, takes his sketchbook and a couple of pencils with him, and he ends up sitting in the nearby park for a couple hours, doodling, sketching the things he sees, Bucky’s face, little cartoons, pretty much whatever his hand seems to want to do.

Eventually, he goes back home. Sam is sitting on the couch watching something loud and ridiculous and violent on tv, so Steve slumps down next to him and stares at the television.

He tries to cook dinner. He’s not very good at it.

They order Chinese instead.

Later, he’s not really sure _how much_ later, Sam finds him in his office/studio, curled in the corner with his arms wrapped tight around his knees, as small as he can make himself. He’d meant to get up, meant to do it ages ago. He hadn’t meant to be found like this, small and vulnerable and obvious with it.

Sam clucks at him, but sits down next to him without a word, presses his shoulder against Steve’s and they stay like that for a while, until Steve’s managed to relax a little, loosen his grip on himself until his knuckles have color in them again.

Sam is a good friend. And he’s clearly good at his job, but then, Steve already knew that.

Eventually, Sam coaxes him up from the floor. Sam stretches when they’re standing, making a noise like his joints bother him or something like that, and then glares at Steve when he has no need to do anything like that. 

“Goddamn super soldiers, gonna give me an inferiority complex,” he mutters. But he smiles at Steve to soften the blow, and then leads him down the hall and pushes him into his own room. “Put your pajamas on,” he suggests, only Steve can hear that it’s more of an order. “Get into bed.”

Sam leaves, and Steve obeys, changing into the soft sleep pants he’s been wearing the past few nights, sleep or no sleep, and a t-shirt that’s draped over the chair in the corner. It doesn’t smell dirty, so he shrugs into it.

Steve sits on his bed, not sure how he feels about trying to sleep, and is still sitting there when Sam returns, carrying a pillow and some of the blankets off his bed. 

“In,” he says, and again Steve obeys. He’s on autopilot, not really listening or thinking, just doing what Sam says. 

Sam crawls into the bed next to him, getting under the covers next to Steve and draping his own blankets over himself, because it’s true that Steve tends to be a bit of a cover-hog. He manhandles Steve until he’s on his side, and then puts his arms around Steve.

“Go to sleep, Steve,” Sam says.

“Sam, I--”

“We’re not talking, Steve. We’re sleeping.” Sam punctuates his assertion with a giant fake yawn, and Steve smiles.

“All right,” Steve agrees. He lets himself relax in Sam’s arms, and eventually he falls asleep.


End file.
